This fall, Dr. Amanda Kay McVety offered a new course called “Pandemics in World History.” The class began with the sixth-century Plague of Justinian and ended in 2020 with students writing a final paper about how COVID-19 fits into the larger history of pandemics.

Students read both historical and fictional accounts of pandemics and examined how science is currently changing the history by creating phylogenetic trees that link the pathogens of the past to their modern descendants and that allow us to map the movement of specific pandemics over space and time with greater certainty than ever before. The history discussed by the class gave the students a new framework for understanding the current global situation.

In turn, the COVID-19 pandemic helped students feel connected to people in the past whose own lives were upended by microbes. In the middle of the semester, students were assigned to small groups to research and create a video report on a specific 19th-century pandemic or series of epidemics.

At the occasion of the 2020 centennial of the 19th Amendment, Dr. Kimberly Hamlin published an important book on a little known protagonist in the suffrage movement. Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (W.W. Norton, March 2020) tells the remarkable true story of the "fallen woman" who changed her name, reinvented herself, and became one of the most effective feminist reformers of the Progressive Era.

When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth’s affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and devoted her life to championing women’s rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She published seven books and countless essays, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit. Gardener eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where her tireless work proved, according to her colleague Maud Wood Park, "the most potent factor" in the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Free Thinker is the first biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener, who died as the highest-ranking woman in federal government and a national symbol of female citizenship. Hamlin exposes the racism that underpinned the women’s suffrage movement and the contradictions of Gardener’s politics. Her life sheds new light on why it was not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the 19th Amendment became a reality for all women and how the sexual double standard has shaped women's entry into politics.

Throughout the year, Dr. Hamlin lectured widely – also at Miami – to discuss her new book and the suffrage movement. The subject figured prominently in Dr. Hamlin’s new course, “#MeToo: A Cultural History.” Women entered reform work in the 19th century first and foremost to attain bodily autonomy, providing a long history for the modern #MeToo movement. Over the decades (and especially after the campaign to raise the age of sexual consent for girls, which Hamlin wrote about this summer for Smithsonian magazine), women became convinced that the vote was the most efficient way to gain control over their bodies. The course explored the role of rape/sexual assault in American history – from Pocahontas to the modern #MeToo movement – highlighting how sexual assault helped maintain slavery and white supremacy and centering black women's leadership in the long struggle against sexual violence. The students in the #MeToo course produced an inspiring array of work, and their final projects proposed changes on our campus and beyond to reduce rape and better support survivors. 

Students taking World History since 1945 at the MUDEC campus with Dr. Elena Jackson Albarrán this semester had the opportunity to have a rare (these days) hands-on archival experience.

Taking advantage of the trove of documents from past MUDEC semesters housed in the attic of the château, students were able to witness the events of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of their predecessors who were present at the fall of the Berlin Wall, traveled behind the Iron Curtain to Moscow, and traversed the cityscapes of Paris and Prague just following the events of 1968. They organized their research with the help of the research platform highlighted above, Dr. Andrew Offenburger’s SourceNotes.

To help think about the changing meaning of travel over time, the students read Richard Ivan Jobs’ Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe, and then enjoyed a virtual visit from Dr. Jobs projected via Zoom in the Grand Hall. Through this interactive session, students heard some of his firsthand accounts from the archives and the rails, and also benefited from his expert analysis of the MUDEC archival documents that they found to complement his book. 

The fun continues next semester, as the spring 2021 cohort will continue the deep-dive into Miami’s Luxembourg archive.